Where do we recruit novel and unconventional conceptual materials from when we speak, think and act metaphorically, and why? This question has been partially answered in the cognitive linguistic literature but, in my view, a crucial aspect of it has been left out of consideration or not dealt with in the depth it deserves: it is the effect of various kinds of context on metaphorical conceptualization. Of these, I examine the following: (1) the immediate physical setting, (2) what we know (...) about the major entities participating in the discourse, (3) the immediate cultural context, (4) the immediate social setting, and (5) the immediate linguistic context itself. I suggest that we recruit conceptual materials for metaphorical purposes not only from bodily experience but also from all of these various contexts. Since the contexts can be highly variable, the metaphors used will often be variable, novel, and unconventional. The phenomenon can be observed in both everyday forms of language and literary texts. (shrink)

The abundant and systematic presence of metaphor in language has in particular been explored by departing from the embodied nature of many metaphors. In the current research we investigate the manner in which the concept EATING in two nonrelated languages, namely Afrikaans (a Germanic language) and Northern Sotho (a Bantu language) gives rise to metaphorical expressions in these two languages. The two notions of cultural model and metaphor form the cornerstones of our research. The basic question guiding our research is (...) whether the metaphorical mappings originating from the same source domain (EATING) onto various target domains are the same in the two languages and secondly, whether there is any evidence that differences—if any—are culturally motivated.Our study is corpus-based. Lexical items belonging to the source domain of eating were used as search nodes in our corpus search. Our analysis indicates that the metaphorical source-domain–target-domain mappings in the two languages show a large amount of overlap. As far as the metaphors that we identified are concerned, remarkable similarities and very few—and these not significant—differences were found. (shrink)

A cross-linguistic/cultural study of verbal metaphor compares responses to terrorism in the UK (N = 96) and to urban violence in Brazil (N = 11). Focus groups discussed how violence changes perceptions of risk, decisions of daily life, and attitudes to others. Metaphor vehicles were identified in transcribed data, then grouped together semantically; 15 vehicle groupings were used with similar frequencies, 16 groupings more in UK data, 14 more in Brazil data. Systematic and framing metaphors were found inside vehicle groupings. (...) A small set of frequent verbal metaphors work as predicted by conceptual metaphor theory. Other verbal metaphor vehicles work much more specifically, as posited by discourse dynamics theory, metaphorizing contextually distinct aspects of living with violence. Major differences were found in responses to violence: UK participants demonstrate feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency through metaphor vehicles relating to Games of Chance, the Concealed nature of terrorist activity, and Body Postures negatively evaluating response from the authorities; Brazilian participants use metaphor vehicles of Violence to emphasize how the threat of urban violence itself becomes a powerful social force that constrains daily activities. (shrink)

This study was an attempt to investigate the nature of metaphor by doing a cross-cultural comparison of metaphor in 2 typologically different languages-English and Persian. For this purpose, animal metaphors were taken for comparison. The "GREAT CHAIN OF BEING" metaphor (Lakoff & Turner, 1989), along with the principle of metaphorical highlighting (Kovecses, 2002), were used as a framework in comparing different aspects of animal metaphors as interpreted by native speakers of the 2 languages. The results showed that although animal metaphors (...) in English and Persian are similar to a certain extent, many aspects of them are culture-specific. The similarities and differences among 44 animal metaphors in these 2 languages are shown and some possible explanations are put forward. (shrink)

From its very outset, the cognitive theory of metaphor has rested on the basic premise that metaphor and culture are intimately related (a good case in point in this respect is the notion of ideali...